"_Dear Mr. Drennen_: The greetings of Ygerne, Countess of Bellaire, to the Son of a Thief! Thank you for a new kind of summer flirtation.

May your next one be as pleasant. A man of such wonderful generosity deserves great happiness. Good-bye. YGERNE."

Simple enough. And yet the words meant nothing to him. By his foot was a square box of chocolates peeping out at him. He had telegraphed . . . where was it? . . . to Edmontville for them. They were for Ygerne. There on the log, right where she had sat, under the little chip of bark, was her necklace of pearls. She was coming for it in a moment, coming like Aurora's own sweet self through the dawn. He had telegraphed for that, too. It was his first present for her.

The Son of a Thief! The Countess of Bellaire! That meant David Drennen, son of John Harper Drennen; it meant Ygerne, the girl-woman who had come into David Drennen's life before it was too late, who had made of him another man.

He sat down on the log and filled his pipe. The note he let lie, half folded, upon his knee. His eyes went thoughtfully across the thin mist hanging like gauze above the river; then turned expectantly toward the Settlement. She would come in a moment. And the glory of her! The eternal quivering, throbbing glory of the woman a man loves! She would come and he would gather her into his arms. . . . For that the world had been made, for that he had lived until now. . . .

He had lighted his pipe and was puffing at it slowly, each little cloud of smoke coming at the regular interval from its brethren. And he did not know that he was smoking. He was not thinking. For the moment he was scarcely experiencing an emotion. He knew that Marshall Sothern was John Harper Drennen; he knew that the Golden Girl had been sold; he knew that a box of candy and a pearl necklace were waiting for Ygerne; he knew that there was a note upon his knee which purported to be from her. Each of these things was quite clear and separate in his mind; the strange thing about them was that they had in some way lost significance to him.

Presently, with a start, he took his pipe from his lips and ran a hand across his forehead. What was he sitting here like a fool for? Either Ygerne had written that note or she had not. If she had written it she had done so either in jest or seriously. He turned back toward the Settlement. He did not think of the jewelled thing hidden under a bit of bark or the cardboard box in its nest in the gra.s.s.

He went swiftly. The town was sleeping, would not awake for another hour. His eyes were upon Marquette's house as soon as the rambling building came into view. There were no fires; window shades were drawn, doors closed.

He came to Ygerne's window. It, too, was closed. Here, also, the shade was down. He tapped softly. When there was no answer he tapped again. Then he went to Marquette's door and knocked sharply.

"_Nom de nom_." It was Pere Marquette's voice, sleepy and irritable.

The old man was fumbling with the bar or the lock or whatever it was that fastened his door. He seemed an eternity in getting the thing done. Then his towsled head and blinking eyes appeared abruptly.

"Where is Miss Bellaire?" said Drennen quietly. "I want a word with her."

"Mees Bellaire? _Hein_?"

"Yes," answered Drennen a trifle impatiently, though he was holding himself well in hand. "Miss Bellaire. I know it is early, but . . ."

Pere Marquette blinked at him curiously with brightening, birdlike eyes. He didn't like Drennen; G.o.d knows he had little enough reason to see any good in this gaunt, wolf-like man. There was a dry cackle in the old man's voice as he spoke again, the door closing slowly so that only half of his face with one bright eye looked out.

"Early? _Mais, non, m'sieu_! It is late! M'am'selle, she is gone _il y a quelques heures_, already! Pouf! Like that, in a hurry."

"Gone?" demanded Drennen. "Where? When?"

"Where? Who knows? When?" He shrugged. "Two, t'ree, four hours, _peutetre_ six."

"Who was with her?"

"Ho," cackled the old man so that Drennen's hands itched to be at the withered throat, "where she go, there are men to follow! Me, when I am yo'ng, before Mamma Jeanne make me happy, I . . ."

"d.a.m.n you and your Mamma Jeanne!" cried Drennen. "Tell me about this girl. Who went with her?"

"Not so many," muttered Marquette, "because she go quiet, in the dark.

In the day the whole Settlement would follow, _non_? But Marc Lemarc, he go; an' M'sieu Sefton, he go; an' M'sieu Ramon, he go. . . ."

"I'll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me which way they went!" broke in Drennen crisply. "I'll give you five hundred if you can tell me why?"

"_Qui sait_?" grumbled Marquette. "They go, they go In the dark, they go with horses runnin' like h.e.l.l. M'am'selle sleep; then come Lemarc, fas', to knock on her window. I hear. She dress d.a.m.n fas', too, or she don't dress at all; in one minute she's outside with Lemarc. I hear Sefton; I hear Ramon Garcia, a little song in his throat. I hear horses. I hear M'am'selle Ygerne laugh like it's fon! Then she wake me an' she pay me; I see Lemarc give her money, gol' money, to pay.

Me, I go back to bed an' Mamma Jeanne suspec' it might be I flirt with the M'am'selle by dark!"

He chuckled again and closed the door as Drennen turned abruptly and went back down the street towards his dugout.

Marc Lemarc had robbed him of the ten thousand dollars. He began there, strangely cool-thoughted. That didn't matter. He had half expected it all along. He knew now, clearly, that, more than that, he had half hoped for it. The money meant less than nothing to him; the theft of it, he had thought, would show Ygerne just what sort of man Lemarc was, would separate her from her companions, would draw her even closer to him. But Ygerne, too, had gone with the money and with Lemarc. Marquette had seen him hand her the gold that she might pay her reckoning. Here was a contingency upon which he had not counted.

As soon as Lemarc had returned she had gone. Sefton had gone with them. Ramon Garcia, too. Why Garcia?

A scene he had not forgotten, which now he could never forget, occupied his mind so vividly that he did not see the material things among which he was walking: Ramon Garcia at Ygerne's window, the gift of a few field flowers, the kissing of a white hand.

Men who had known Drennen for years and who would have been surprised at what was in the man's face yesterday, saw nothing new to note in him to-day. He went his own way, he was silent, his face was hard and not to be read. All day he was about the Settlement, in his own dugout a large part of the time, going to his meals regularly at Joe's. It was rumoured that he had sold his claim; men began to doubt it. He wasn't scattering money as men had always done when they had made a fortune at a turn of the wheel; he wasn't getting drunk which was the customary thing; he wasn't even looking for a game of cards or dice. There was no sign of any new purpose in the man.

And yet the purpose was there, taken swiftly, to be acted upon with a cold leisure. Drennen was not hurrying now. There was no other horse like Major, his recently purchased four-year-old, and Drennen knew it.

He had ridden Major hard yesterday; to-day the brute must rest and be ready for more hard riding.

One thing only did Drennen do which excited mild interest, though the reason for the act was naturally misunderstood. He went to Joe and bought from him two heavy revolvers. Drennen had never been a gun man, had ever relied upon his own hands in time of trouble. But now, Joe figured the matter out, he had money and he meant to guard against a hold-up.

Entire lack of haste was the only thing remarkable about David Drennen to-day and through the days which followed. There was no hesitation, no doubt, no being torn two ways. He had made up his mind what he was going to do. It was settled and not to be reconsidered. But he would not hurry. The very coolness with which his purpose was taken steadied him to a strange deliberateness. He knew that it was folly to expect to come up with Ygerne and the men with her immediately. It would take time; they had fled hastily and they were in a country where pursuit was necessarily slow. Was that not the reason why such people came here? And he told himself grimly that it was an equal folly to desire to come upon them too soon. The punishment he would mete out would be the harder if their flight had seemed crowned with security.

Upon the second day he rode in widening circles about MacLeod's Settlement. He hardly hoped to pick up a trail here where questing hundreds in search of his gold had cut the soft spring ground into a jumble of indecipherable tracks. But, beginning his own quest with a painstaking thoroughness which omitted no chance however remote, he spent the day in seeking.

At night he came again into camp. He saw to the Major's wants before his own. He ate his meal at Joe's and having pa.s.sed no word with any man came back to his dugout.

The supreme blow which his destiny could give him had been smitten relentlessly. He had received it like the slave who has been beaten so many times that he no longer cries out or strikes back prematurely.

Like the tortured bond-man who makes no useless protest but hides in his bosom the knife which one day he will plunge into his master's throat, Drennen merely bided his time.

He saw no good in a world which had had no good to offer him. He no longer looked for the light. New shoots of faith, bursting upward under Ygerne's influence from the dry roots of the old, were in an instant shrivelled and killed. He came to see that in an old world there was no basic law but that law which had held from the first day in the new world. There was no good; bad was only a term coined for fools by other fools. Each man had his life given to him, and he could do with it as he saw fit. Each wild thing in the depths of the North Woods had its life given to it to do with as it saw fit. Each created being, were it not maudlin, strove for itself alone. It took its own food where it could get it, rending it with bared teeth and b.l.o.o.d.y jaws from the weaker creature that had preyed upon a still weaker. It made its lair where it chose, crushing under its careless body those other still lesser things which had not sense enough or the opportunity to slip out from under it. Love, as man looked upon it or pretended to look upon it, was no real emotion but a poetical illusion. Nor was it so much as truly poetical, since poetry is truth and this thing was a lie. There was no love but the old, primal love of life, a blind, unreasoning instinct. He did not love Ygerne; he had never loved Ygerne because, in the nature of nature, there could be no such thing as such a love.

But hatred was another matter. That was nature. A man, with all of his bl.u.s.ter, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze and kill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no place in nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolf kills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodied caterpillar not so much in hunger as in wrath.

The lower order of created beings seemed to Drennen to be the truly higher order. For they did not philosophise; they killed their prey.

They did not reason and thus follow a blind G.o.ddess; they moved as their swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did not need to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through the thousand lanes of reason's labyrinth; he did not need to seek the fallacies of logic to tell him why he hated Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc and Sefton and the Mexican. He hated them. There the fact began and ended. One by one he would kill them until he came to Ygerne. And if in her eyes he saw that the terror of death was greater than the terror of the suffering he could inflict upon her living, then he would kill her.

At first he thought only of these four. But after a while in his thoughts there was room for another. . . . John Harper Drennen, masquerading as Marshall Sothern. Drennen sneered at his old hero.

The old man was a fool like so many other fools. He had committed what the world calls a crime and the weight of it had shown upon him.

Drennen's sneer was not for the wrong done but for the weakness of allowing suffering to come afterward. The old man had seemed glad, touched almost to tears, when his son had paid off the old score. . . .

And now Drennen's sneer was for himself. Why had he not kept that forty thousand dollars? Money meant power and power was all that he wanted. Power to crush men who would have crushed him had they been able; power to seek his prey where he would and to pull it down.

Ygerne's note he never read the second time. He had had no need to.

He burned the paper and washed his hands free of the ashes which he had crumpled in his palm.

The third day he rose early, saddled Major and left the Settlement, riding slowly toward Lebarge. He had an idea that they might have gone there to take the train. When half way to the railroad he met a man who was pushing on strongly toward the north. The man stopped and accosted him. It was the mounted police officer, Lieutenant Max.

"Mr. Drennen," said the lieutenant bruskly coming straight to the business in hand after his way; "you come from MacLeod's?"

"Yes."

"You know two men named Sefton and Lemarc? And a girl named Bellaire?"

"Yes."

"Were they in MacLeod's when you left?"